Yesterday I gathered some friends and ran an all-day session of AW. I was intending to run it as a one shot but it ended on a cliffhanger after resolving a major action scene. Three of the players had never played an RPG before, the others were mostly experienced with D&D and hadn't played in a while.
They chose playbooks and we ended up with:
Wolf, an ambiguous Ruin Runner
Wilson, a female Operator with a scatterbrained crew consisting of Winkle and Dusk
Boo, a female Angel with an infirmary, assistants Franky and Moxy
Chuck, an ambiguous Juggernaut with a fast suit with a missile rack
Pascal, a male Driver with a widebody Cadillac with extensive interior decoration that he called "The Louvre"
Amanual, a seriously weird Savvyhead with a workshop
We came up with Princetown, a glorified logging camp in the foothills of a coastal mountain range, somewhere in Northern California or Oregon, maybe. Princy and her goons kept things inside the stockade fence pretty quiet. Up the mountainside there were mountain men and other assorted savages who raided occasionally when they got brave, drunk, or desperate. Down in the valley was Spook Town, the remains of an old city. Now mostly overtaken by the pine forests, brave sorts like Wolf would rummage for scrap while the sun was out, but by night weird noises and sometimes firelight would appear and superstition kept folks away. Over the mountain there were some fishing villages but Princetown was pretty isolated otherwise.
What went well:
The group dove right into answering and asking questions at the beginning as I tried to sketch out the parameters of the world.
I printed out a bunch of cards with black and white portraits on them and let the players pick a face they liked for their characters and used the rest for NPCs. Giving every NPC a face and a name made it much easier to keep characters straight in my head and to improvise in character.
In the second half of the session, I got into a flow and managed to snowball the character moves into a couple of satisfying confrontations and raise a bunch of interesting questions.
The PCs used a combination of violence and diplomacy, and ended up bartering Boo the Angel's services on a badly wounded NPC Brute for some temporary loyalty from the rest of the Brutes.
The new players made their moves boldly. I was worried that they would hang back, but they jumped right in.
Treating the NPCs as people with simple motivations made it easy for me to figure out how they would respond to the PCs. Putting them in the crosshairs let me escalate a couple of situations in an interesting way when the PCs seemed afraid to act.
What surprised me:
If you want to know what Juggling is like for an Operator, run a session with six players, half of them newbs. I was expecting four and then a couple of "maybes" turned into "yeses" the night before. Everyone had fun but I had a heck of a time divvying up screen time and trying to run scenes in parallel. Wilson the operator had a B-plot related to her obligation gig early on but it trailed off mid-session. Wilson got stuck back in town away from the rest of the group and her player ended up taking over Chuck the Juggernaut, whose player has to leave early.
The Juggernaut's 3-armor does not mess around. Chuck got shot in the face with a high-powered rifle and barely noticed. Later they got mobbed by about a dozen primitive screwheads and fought them to a standstill.
What could have gone better:
I made Princetown too safe for the PCs. All of the pressure that I applied was outside the walls and it made the early game too slow. I was not making enough MC moves and the ones I did make were way too soft. I was doing too much free-floating narration with no move attached.
I totally failed to tie the Operator and her gigs into the the main line of the fiction.
Later in the game when I was making more and harder moves, I was too incremental and didn't reshape the scene enough after each move. Some conflicts and challenges got drawn out into too many moves and there were too many die rolls for the amount of fiction generated.
The residents of Spook Town naturally got called "spooks", and when they turned out to be people instead of creatures, it made me a little queasy to use an (admittedly somewhat antiquated) racial slur.
In the end it felt more like the first episode of an ongoing series rather than a self-contained one-shot, mostly due to slack pacing in the first half.
The good news is that everyone at the table had a good time and the newbs want to play more RPGs.